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With today's P4's running at 3.2GHz out of the box (ad I don't know what when overclocked) and people having to put 450W power supplies into their machines to keep them running, cooling is a big issue. But cooling to what temperature?
I did some searches on processors and ended up drowning in numbers, so I thought I'd just ask for your opinions:

Before I went fan crazy my CPU temps were reaching 120 F/62C. That's not good. Thermalright recommends a nice cool 44 C to 54 C. That's even when running games.

I am running some of the setup you have currently at 44 C and I am in the green. Now I have Thermalrights X-90C heatsink with Vantec's Tornado on my CPU running now at 5vdc. I have a switch to turn it to 12vdc when I play games, but its loud. It cools it fast down 10 degrees.

Really, when I'm playing games and I see it glitch, I turn it to 12vdc for a while. It works nice.

Thanks for the specs Rigel but I was really asking about real world data, such as your own system.

My 3.2GHz P4 is in a mini system with a temp controlled extractor fan so when I'm browsing it purrs and when I'm gaming it roars - which of course you don't notice because of the game noise. The CPU generally sits around 50C but might get to 60C when hard pressed.

I know someone with a mini-tower whose CPU sits at 67C (due to really bad arrangement of PSU, CPU and AGP card creating a ventless enclosure in which to 'cook' the CPU.

But I've seen posts (some here) of people talking about their CPU's running at ~23C

So that's why I'm curious what CPU have you got, and what tempertature do you prefer it to run at?

Currently, my AMD XP 3000+ is sitting at 31 C and the motherboard is at 24 C. It may get worse in the summertime. My system is a little noisy - I've got three case fans and the power supply fan as well as the processor fan. Case fans are front, side and top rear.

That's an excellent question Powerboss. I'm so used to having the utility provided by my motherboard manufacturer that I'd forgotten others may not have the same facility.I'm pretty sure all modern BIOS versions monitor CPU temp and case temp and fan speeds, along with the various voltages supplied by the PSU. There are programs available to read that information and display it in Windows - but I don't have any idea what to recommend! The one I've got is only for Soltek mobos (and its pretty clunky anyway).

My experience is this: the comfort zone for a CPU varies tremendously with the type of chip; different sockets and even different cores vary widely, and to further muddy things, each CPU is unique in a number of ways- I've seen three systems side by side running the same chip, memeory, etc., operating perfectly happily in three distinct temperature zones. it's not nearly as big a deal as people make it out to be- much beter to judge performance from benchmarks than by temp, and the specs are pretty much unreliable. and, just to make it more fun, the thermocouples used to measure temps are usually wildly inaccurate! hooray!:)

because the die-making procedure is pretty much a 'pray and spray' occasion, and the processes involved are damn near subatomic, the transistor patterns on a single die can vary widely- they chop them up into cores and sort them based on how much juice each little chunk can stand- or what quanity is needed for a particular run- that's why overclocking freaks get so worked up about "CPU from Week 97!!OMFG!!", because that week, maybe a particularly fine die was tested and sold at a far lower clock speed than it can really take.

real world, with modern chips, expect P4's to pull about 55-70 watts( thus temps around 55C-70C., but it's not a huge deal- many of the P4s I've handled recently, like the 3.0e, 3.2e, etc., seem to run just fine at 70c and higher, and most P4 boards don't have thermal event shutdowns until the 80's. perfomance is definitely helped by better cooling, but only up to a point- I don't see much difference ebtween a P4 runing at 60c and 40c. doing wacky overclocking like dunking your PC in a fishtank and getting the CPu close to the ambeint temperature WILL help- it's usually a PITA and far more trouble than slapping some ram, a decent GPU and a RAID array on there.

AMDs are touted as cooler- they are, mostly, and the new AMD64s are practically refrigerators- my AMD64 3000+ at home runs overclocked, full CPU usage, at a smokin' 35-7c :D. Athlons/durons run hotter- , but vary widely- expect 45-65c . as a rule, the CPU temp shouldn't delta much above 10c- huge spikes of 20c indicate a problem.

at home- Althon Tbird, stock cooling, 55-63c- runs like a dream. AMD64 3000+ Winchester 29-37c with a Zalman 7000Cu(rocks!). Celeron 2.2(in a laptop) 65-70. at work- Sempron 3000+- 40c. smoking new gaming machine we built- AMD64 3500+ 55-65c. i just saw a Pentium running at 200MHz with a heatsink that was quite literally too hot to touch. really cranked on that Windows 95, tho :)

PC WizKid Posted: Apr 27 2005, 08:13 PMThe computer could be over-heating it is restrating itself to protect the CPU.

FRADesigns Posted: Apr 27 2005, 08:19 PM I don't think its overheating as I have a speedfan on and is currently running at 27 degrees C

OK 27C not 23C, but I was close!

In my little non-airconditioned office here inthe land of OZ, in summertime when the ambient temperature is >35C, I often hear these strange alarm noises coming from my (old) system and wonder what they mean?

This may seem a little stupid as well, but I have a laptop and I wanted to check mine as well... to compare mine with yours. Also, if I need to how would I update my BIOS (to make sure it could check the temp of my laptop) if this is possbile.

yanowhiz - I can't compare laptops with you since I don't own one! (too poor *cry*)Try installing Speedfan it should be able to get info from your laptop. You'd have to refer to Compaq(HP) support for BIOS upgrade instructions.